Avoid Electrocution
by Roscuro
Summary: All things considered, there were probably worse ways to die. Permanently, for example, instead of staggering out of your parents' ghost portal still clinging desperately to half of your life. But if anyone asked his opinion—and they never did, funnily enough—he would advise them to avoid electrocution.


For the Christmas Truce gift exchange on tumblr. For darkeneddaybreak! I'm v-for-venusaur on tumblr if you want to stop on by.

Prompt: I asked for this last year, too, but I'm really interested to see how other people might interpret/design a more monsterish version of Danny. Can you see his skeleton through his skin? Does he get fangs or something like Vlad or dark Dan? Whatever they decide to do, something that makes Danny a little– or a lot– freakier than normal. Also I'd prefer if Danny was sane and sweet, but I wouldn't mind a little angst/horror either (like blood or ectoplasm on the mouth or something). It's really up to them, though. :)

* * *

Danny Fenton was many things, but no one would ever accuse him of being subtle. Too Gryffindor, as Tucker would say over Sam's protests that if Tucker wanted some _real_ books about magic she had some that were _way_ better than that mainstream Harry Potter crap. Too clumsy, his parents would say after he accidentally dropped yet another piece of glassware or set off a ghost-hunting device. Too cowardly, the other kids at school would say, referencing with derision the countless times that ghosts had shown up and Danny had made himself scarce.

Too _Danny_ , his sister would say, mopping up yet another injury her little brother earned by putting his body between a monster and a fragile human life. And that was when he was human himself.

As a ghost, it was even worse. Forget sneaking around, Danny Phantom was lucky to not be the center of attention everywhere he went. The rumor currently circulating around town was that Phantom was not a ghost but a corpse animated by ectoplasm, which for Danny ranked below the Halloween demon rumor but above the cosplay ghost rumor. He couldn't keep track of them all, but Sam had an ear for gossip and Tucker kept a running list in his PDA, and every so often the three of them would go through and rank the public opinion. It was either that or have a breakdown, and he didn't have time for one when Amity Park was entering its third year of being the Most Haunted City in America and still going strong.

It wasn't just that the ectoplasm in his system made him a living—well, non-living, he supposed—glow stick, though that was bad enough. It wasn't the pervasive scent of ozone that clung to his skin like perfume and lingered wherever he went, an inconvenient calling card. It wasn't even the x-ray translucency of his skin and suit through which one could see the flickering outline of bone and meat, the whispering flush of ectoplasm that cradled his useless organs, his heart an unbeating lump and a neon green target. It was the _electricity_.

It was really more of an electrical field, they'd found after some tests in his parents' basement laboratory, and he had pretty much no control over it as a human or as a ghost. Danny liked to call it his ghost sense, which was logical enough but still made Sam and Tucker stifle snickers. ("Sorry, dude, but I think Spiderman's trademarked that sort of talk.") Whenever ghosts got within the massive field he put off, sparks would run down his skin like static electricity, getting progressively more violent the longer he stayed human. His own body was a generator he could never quite contain, but he could reign it in, keep the power within himself without hurting anyone long enough to run away and go ghost. It was a good thing he was half-dead already, Tucker once said after Danny's usual battery of physical tests; there was no way an actual complete human would be able to hold in what Danny was channeling and survive. Danny was mostly just grateful that he looked cool with his white hair floating in a staticky halo around his head, because there was absolutely nothing he could do about it and there was just enough normal teenage boy left in him to care about that sort of thing.

All things considered, there were probably worse ways to die. Permanently, for example, instead of staggering out of your parents' ghost portal still clinging desperately to half of your life. But if anyone asked his opinion—and they never did, funnily enough—he would advise them to avoid electrocution.

* * *

It was a truly beautiful day, and Tucker and Danny couldn't justify staying indoors to play video games when the brisk air smelled like oncoming fall in the best sort of way. That's not to say they didn't try to justify it, but in the end failed spectacularly and followed Sam to the park with only the complaints necessary to maintain their reputations as sore losers. Of course, even sandwiched between his two very best friends as they strolled through an idyllic forest with the sun providing just enough warmth that the shade of the canopy above felt welcome, Tucker would never say no to finding other things to complain about.

"Ow! Man, watch where you're waving that thing!" Tucker patted his own shoulder tenderly as if it were an upset baby (or a flour sack, considering how much more concern he'd historically shown for those than actual infants).

Danny scoffed, waving the object in question around a few more times. "That _thing_ happens to be my hand, Tuck." He feigned a punch.

"Yeah," the other boy shot back with a flinch, "and _your hand_ happens to be a cattle prod sometimes."

Sam perked up, violet eyes sparking with interest like they only did under two circumstances: something greater than or equal to her level of goth was rolling into town, or there was an impending opportunity to promote some ultra-recyclo-vegetarianism cause. "You know, this is a great opportunity for you to gain some sympathy for the actual cows who have to suffer so that you can have your Nastyburgers! _In fact_ —"

"So Danny!" Tucker yanked off his beret and held it up between his face and Sam's like that would save him from impassioned activism. "Ghosts in the area?"

"Just one, out on the edges of my field." He gestured vaguely in the direction of the docks, swallowing a laugh as Sam shot the both of them a glare around the hat. "Somewhere over there. It feels like the Box Ghost's laying low, so I wasn't going to do anything about it unless he forced my hand." Said hand got a little too enthusiastic with its vague gestures and Tucker leapt away defensively, spinning Sam in a neat half-turn that made her a buffer between the two boys.

"Ugh! Could you be mature about this for like five seconds?" Sam scowled, pleased that she had decided to go with the makeup best suited for scowling that morning. "Danny's not doing it on purpose, probably."

"I'm just looking out for the safety of my babies, _Samantha_ ," Tucker sniffed, jamming his hat back onto his head. He shrugged off his backpack to cradle it pointedly, eyeing Danny up and down. "You would not believe the number of my devices this boy's fried."

Danny winced and offered an apologetic grin, holding his hands up innocently. Small blue sparks leapt from fingertip to fingertip, unnoticeable unless you were looking for them. "As Sam said, not on purpose."

"Probably," the girl corrected with a smug grin. "I said probably."

Danny opened his mouth to offer a rebuttal, but instead shivered violently and clenched his fists as trails of lightning ran up his arms. Sam violently started back from the sudden electricity, crashing into Tucker. He helped her get her balance and looked up in time to see Danny's hair, already a messy black nest to begin with, bristling like an angry cat's fur.

"Uh, to be actually serious for a second, dude, are you sure it's just the Box Ghost?" Tucker asked skeptically. "You're running awful hot for him." The next moment, he pulled out one of many specialized PDAs from his bag and tapped away on it without waiting for any input from Danny.

"Yeah, I'm sure." Eyes squeezed shut, Amity Park's hero exhaled slowly and released his fists. Sparks shot from his palms to the dirt for a solid ten seconds and his hair settled down, but when he opened his eyes with a weary sigh, they were toxic green. "I've been getting jolts of power from my ghost sense for a few days, though. Nothing I can't mostly control, and not enough to force me to go ghost, but every so often I've needed to vent excess energy. Sorry, Sam."

Propping one fingerless black glove-clad hand on her hip, Sam affectionately punched his arm with the other. "It's fine," she muttered. "I know you didn't do it on purpose."

"Probably," he agreed faintly.

Tucker was metaphorically elbow-deep in his PDA by the time the two of them got their blushing under control. "Listen, Danny, go ghost for a minute, okay?" he demanded once he'd gotten tired of waiting for the flush in Sam's unnaturally pale cheeks to dissipate.

"Why?" Danny asked, glad of an excuse to turn away from Sam.

Tucker pushed his glasses further up onto his nose, not bothering to look up from his readout. "Because you owe Sam for that scare and she wants you to go ghost."

The girl shrugged ambivalently, stepping back to give him room and peering with shameless curiosity over Tucker's shoulder.

Danny narrowed his eyes—still the dangerous green of ectoplasm, so out of place in his soft human face—and frowned. "We could have been playing Bioshock right now, Tuck."

"You could have been electrocuting my gaming system right now is what we could have been doing. Go ghost."

"Why, Tucker?" Danny insisted. "We agreed no one got to be the annoyingly cryptic member of this team because that always ends poorly." He settled with arms akimbo into a glower that all three of them knew he could keep up for days.

"You know, it's this same Gryffindor impulse of yours that makes you look up spoilers to things and then spoil them for _me_." Tucker threw his hands up, letting Sam snatch the PDA from him so that he could cross his arms in a most satisfactorily pouty manner. "Fine, ruin what could have been an awesome reveal."

It was Sam that distracted the two boys from their standoff. "Are these readings right?" she asked with a surprising amount of emotion in her voice.

"You bet they are!" Tucker stole back the PDA and waved it in Danny's face too quickly for him to catch anything on the screen. "Dude, your power levels are off the charts right now. You're holding back with only a little struggle a current that would have torn you apart last week. If you go ghost, I bet you could harness it, use it as a weapon. Control sick lightning powers with your little skeletal hands, Static Shock-style."

Sam gasped with delight that was significantly less sardonic than she intended it to be. "Your life could become even more of a Static Shock ripoff!"

One cheesy battle cry later, Danny Phantom hovered in the middle of a forest in the Most Haunted City in America, shaping a little blue swirl of electricity in the cradle of his white gloves. He concentrated, the scent of ozone intensifying and his bones being thrown into sharp relief under his suit. The lightning in his hands spat and roiled but obeyed him, growing in size and swirling between his fingers like the innards of a crystal ball. The ectoplasm in his veins thrummed with energy, and he would almost swear he felt his luminescent heart jolt into beating.

"Sick," Tucker breathed.


End file.
